Episode 11: Making Mudpies
At the chopping Board:
When I work, there will be evidence.
I do not have to manufacture evidence. It will emerge.
The experience I have will bless someone else.
I don’t have to lie about the dirt on my hands. Dirt can be instructive for someone else.
Fish Sandwich:
Genesis 2:4-7 NRSV
4 These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created.In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, 5 when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground; 6 but a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground— 7 then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.
Making Mudpies
When I was a child, my younger brother and I would go into the backyard and make mudpies. This is a very scientific process. What you have to do is, wear your most casual clothes, bring a digging tool of some sort, and water. And basically, you just dig and pour, dig and pour, dig and pour. And then, the best part is you MUSH it. You just squish it. The whole point of the dig is to make a mess. On one of our archaeological digs, we found something that looked like dinosaur bones. But given that we also had a Rottweiler at the time, it could have also been old squirrel remains from one of her adventures.
And every time we would play in the backyard, and come back inside, we would realize just how much we got into. Because dirt has a way of telling on us. Our parents would look at us and laugh. And their first question was, “Did you have fun?”
We did. Of course.
Getting messy is fun. Spending time doing nothing, just because you can, is fun. Playing pretend archaeologist is fun. Imagining you’ve found the remains of an extinct animal is fun.
But we know that children don’t get to do this. Instead, what our children get is incessant test prep. And routines for walking down the hallway with their hands behind their back. And evacuation drills. And worksheets. And they get sent home for having hair that looks like the hair of a Black child. And… and… and…
Sometimes I wish we could start all over, go back to the beginning, undo all that has been done. Get rid of all the evil mess that has made us so vulnerable. I suppose that’s why so many of us are drawn to this creation story. I suppose, even, that’s why it was so popular that people kept requesting it on the radio and at the dinner table, thousands of years ago. After all, that’s how the Bible becomes the bible. Because people keep repeating stories over and over. It’s a human thing. And Creation narratives exist in every religious tradition and cosmology. There is always a story about how the stars came to be, how the earth was placed here, why the elephants have big ears, why the ocean seems to laugh at night, why the moon seems to wink every so often. Because so many of us wonder what life was like before today. Before we got here, what happened? This story is about the very human desire to know how we got here and what for.
This account is a reminder that God created something that did not exist before.
“In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—”
Before this day, there was nothing.
Now, we have to be careful with what we mean by “nothing.” Because we know that this is what colonizers and gentrifiers say before they start stealing land and space. “There’s no craft breweries in East New York!” “You all need more pilates studios and Zumba classes!” “The New World is ripe for the digging!” No one lived here before we got here! Sometimes we believe ourselves to be mini-Gods and that nothing existed before us. So instead of looking out and seeing what actually exists, we convince ourselves that no one has ever done anything before we’ve existed. And this is when destruction happens. The first step in making mudpies is noticing what exists in the first place, even before we begin experimenting.
The writer of this passage, in their scientific notebook, tells us that this was a day when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up...
When we create, when we dream, when we imagine, we are tapping into a very old and divine frequency. Sometimes, we get too far into our brains and we try to think our ways through this miracle. For thousands of years, people have tried to explain how the world started. We’ve got all kinds of theories, all kinds of documentaries, all kinds of debates. Some believe it began with a series of statistically improbable yet highly fascinating coincidences. Others believe it happened exactly as Genesis described it. I happen to believe that the way we got here is a scientific AND divine miracle. And beyond that, I’m moved to imagine that whatever has animated this whole process feels like someone or something making mudpies.
Wonder. Curiosity. Exploration. A scientific posture of curiosity. A divine posture of creativity. It is a divine thing. It requires accountability, caution, humility and care.
And. Creation means we get dirty.
This story is full of puns and word play. Biblical Scholars like Phylis Trible note that the word for human is related to adamah, meaning out of the Earth. The first human comes to be known as Adam, as in, out of the Earth. Trible would not call Adam “a man” so much as “an undifferentiated Earth Creature.” As citizens of a cisnormative world, we have to do better to rethink and expand what we mean by notions of gender and how we make sense of bodies. IN other words, Adam was not the first man. Adam was the first person. Eventually Adam comes to understand himself as “him,” and names Eve as “Eve.” But as we’ve mentioned earlier, there are other creation narratives. This is just one of a universe of explanations as to how Human beings ended up here.
The human species is wide and vast and deep. We know that Adam and later the one who would come to be known as Eve are not the only models of humans that exist. There are so many genders, so many kinds of gender expressions, so many types of ways for the divine to be revealed in our flesh. What a gift that God is so creative beyond our often limited human minds. So God gives this particular human instructions, later telling this human that they should name the animals and birds and plants. If you’re like me, you may be wondering how Adam even knew how to form words or how Adam figured out how to classify living animals without a degree or even so much as a Sesame Street video.
And isn’t that beautiful? Even without formal training, this first human somehow was confident enough to see a thing in the world and give it a name.
I imagine for this period of time, God and this first human are building a friendship. And This human, who used to be just dirt, became a living being once God breathed life into this human’s lungs.
For as many times as I have heard this story, I have always focused on Adam and how cool it must have been to be not born but made. How magical and wondrous and sacred and frightening it must have been for him and his partner Eve to learn so much about living, not through books or advice, but from experience. I almost envy that. Imagine, not just seeing the sunset for the first time, but being the first person to witness a sunset. Thinking about it right now got me in my feelings.
But now, I wonder about this story from God’s experience. If God made this human out of dirt, there must be evidence of this experiment on God’s hands. Because when you play with dirt, you get dirty. And somehow, someone has made the word “dirt” a bad thing. But it’s neutral. Dirt helps things grow. Clay can become pottery. Dirt isn’t a bad thing.
The text would have us to imagine that God very carefully formed Adam from the dust of the ground. The word “formed” has the connotation of “precision,” “Art,” “focus.” But it does not matter how precise, how careful, how focused you are. When you play with dirt, you get dirty. And that’s a value-neutral statement. It is a matter of fact. In fact, it is the dirt of human experience that changes God’s mind.
Just a few books later, we meet a family of daughters whose father Zelophehad had passed. And due to the way the law was written, because there were no men to inherit his fortune, they all were at risk. So they organized among themselves, perhaps prepared their arguments and took turns figuring out who was going to speak first, and they said to Moses “This ain’t right.” Moses took their complaint to God and God replied saying, “the women are right, do right by them and make sure they have their needs met.” God would not have seen things this way had it not been for these women’s experience. They had, marked on their bodies and in their hearts, a particular encounter with the world. And they used this experience to appeal to the systems that existed in their world.
Not only does God change us, but I do think we can change God. We can influence God to act for us and among us. That’s why we pray before protests. Because we invite the divine to spend a little time with us. Because sometimes God needs a reminder.
Let this be a warning though, because these are the times we live in. Some of us are compelled to pretend as though we have been making mudpies, when all we’ve done is read about it.
Fanon would say it this way.
“In fact, we often believe with criminal superficiality that to educate the masses politically is to deliver a long political harangue from time to time. We think that it is enough that the leader or one of his lieutenants should speak in a pompous tone about the principle events of the day for them to have fulfilled this bounden duty to educate the masses politically. Now, political education means opening their minds, awakening them, and allowing the birth of their intelligence; as Cesaire said, it is ‘to invent souls’. To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them; that if we stagnate it is their responsibility, and that if we go forward it is due to them too, that there is no such thing as a demiurge, that there is no famous man who will take the responsibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people themselves and the magic hands are finally only the hands of the people.”
We live in a world where anyone with a cell phone can be understood as an influencer. Anyone with cell service can be called a “thought leader,” an “activist,” a “healer,” a “teacher.” But I want to see the dirt.
There are a good number of accounts that come up impersonating Black people. And I’m not talking about The hashtag Russians. I’m talking about White people selling Black Girl Magic tees on instagram behind avatars of Black people. Amber Phillips pointed out that there are a good number of White artists drawing pictures of Black people and getting awards, attention, and money for it.
I don’t want to know that you got an award, I want to see the dirt.
I want to know that you’ve really been making mud pies.
That the work that you do isn’t just something you do to get gigs. That you aren’t just engaging in thought experiments alone. That you really are connected to a community of accountability. That you actually are who you say you are. That you’ve tried the thing you tell everyone else to do. I want to see receipts. Because there is a certain someone who continues to scam and grift and gaslight black women, and his name rhymes with Dawn Ring. Project after project, event after event, campaign after campaign, and nobody really knows him. YOU seen him?
And I hope this doesn't come off as self-righteous. Because at the end of the day? I think we could all stand to be better community members. Self included. For example, I had to take all of October and November off from accepting new work, because there were other responsibilities that required my attention. I’m not showing up at everyones event because I have responsibilities.
I’ll never forget hearing a Black woman who leads a faith-based organization talk about hosting a prayer call weekly. No matter what she was up to that week, she would make sure that she was around for that. I think our market is trending towards the gig economy and every industry is feeling that. It’s invading teaching, ministry, even activism.
So much so, that a collective of former BLM chapters came together this week to call out the BLM Global network, highlighting several concerns.
In their own words, they say:
“The use of the BLM name, which we believed was intended to unify our struggle, has been commodified and debased. It is now being used to sell products, acquire book deals, T.V. deals, and speaking engagements. We have no interest in these pursuits, and we are opposed to the movement to substitute Black capitalism for white capitalism. It has become clear that the Global network and certain figures have platformed our struggles with the sole purpose of exploiting our labor…
Furthermore, the issue of greatest concern for us is the relationship between the Global Network and the Democratic Party. This is hypocritical at best, as the Democratic Party has historically rejected and ignored BLM’s demands and has made it clear that they are pro-police, pro-prison, and committed to capitalism. From Obama’s support of police and his double-cross of Erica Garner, to “Top Cop” Kamala Harris’ denial of justice for Matrice Richardson, even going back to the 1994 Crime Bill authored by Joe Biden along with the Prisoner Litigation Reform Act that stripped basic human rights from countless Black people—the Democratic Party has literally created the conditions that led to the formation of this movement.”
I will make sure to include a link in the transcript, because their concerns also extend to the lack of financial transparency and what they name as “power moves by Patrisse Cullors and others.”
Because it is far too easy to lie and convince people that we are capable of things we have not studied. There are too many charlatans and grifters pretending to build things and stealing money all in the process. Woe to the one who has figured out that exploiting the vulnerable and misinformed is a lucrative business. I want to see the dirt. I want evidence that you have actually been in the lab.
But if we are being generous. Your dirt can help someone else. And this is important because, your testimony can change a life. We have been bamboozled into believing that dirt makes us unworthy. That the trials we’ve been through need to be cleaned up. That the hurdles we’ve crossed are secrets to keep from everyone. We put so much emphasis on saying, “I don’t look like what I've been through.”
When people give birth, the first thing that someone will say if that person goes back to their original weight quickly is, “OKAY YOU BETTER SNAPBACK!” Why do we put so much pressure on ourselves to hide who we are and what we have come through?Why do we want to pretend as though we have not had addictions, wrestled with family trauma, struggled through self esteem disorders?
What psychologists will say is that group therapy helps when we tell our stories. It matters that we share our stories with folks in a well facilitated environment. Opening up about what we have been through makes us more resilient. Pretending as though the long, cold nights never happened is how we develop anxiety disorders. Ask me how I know.
One of my favorite shows as a child was the Magic School Bus. Ms. Frizzle was a charismatic teacher who would get her students to go and actually explore the very things they were studying. One time the magic school bus shrunk and got baked into a cake. Another time, they shrunk and explored the parts of a plant. They were always on an adventure.
And on this show Ms. Frizzle would say to the students, “Take chances, make mistakes, get messy!”
To which, Arnold, the timid science lover would say, “oh no, I knew I should have stayed home today.”
If you are Ms. Frizzle today, and you’re ready to take chances, make mistakes, get messy, I challenge you to do so in a way that is also compassionate and kind. DOn’t just make mistakes and get messy without thinking about consequences.
And if you’re Arnold today, and you’re scared to try that new thing, and you don’t know if you should take that risk because it always seems to go left, I challenge you to reflect on the ways that God has brought you through thus far.
Get dirty.
Try the cooking class.
Apply for the program.
Go for the promotion.
Test out that new idea you’ve been working on.
Shoot your shot and see if that person will mentor you.
See what’s real and what’s not. Find out how you feel. Struggle through it, knowing that you are a work in process.
Build, dream, get messy. Make your mudpies.
The one who has created us will never leave you to get messy by yourself. God will be right there with you, encouraging you, pushing you, correcting you, offering advice, bringing new friends and comrades.
Take chances. Get messy. Make your mudpies.
To go Bag:
What are you really good at? Roller skating? Singing? Cooking? Yoga? A new TikTok Dance? How did you become good at it? What have you invested in it? What do you need to keep up at it? Is there anyone in your circle who could support you as you’re working on it? Are there other people you’d like to teach?
Notes: Screengrab in the header photo from http://coffeeoperaglitterfluff.blogspot.com/2014/03/mrs-frizzle-inanna-for-our-times.html